CRN Channel News

Looking Ahead To The New Year: Big Changes

While the economy is improving and next year we are likely to see four consecutive quarters of growth in gross domestic product, it's probable we also are going to see more turmoil in high-tech during 2004 than we have in the past two years.

If the power supply traditionally has been treated like the redheaded stepchild of the IT network, one would think it would get better consideration following the August blackout that darkened the Northeast.

In its largest acquisition to date, Citrix Systems Thursday inked a definitive agreement to acquire Expertcity, a provider of Web-based desktop access and help-desk services, for $225 million in cash and stock.

BMC Software's acquisition of Remedy in 2002 cemented BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) strategy, which aims to help companies manage their IT needs from a business perspective. Remedy's Vice President and General Manager, Jim Grant, recently spoke with CRN Managing Editor Charlene O'Hanlon about the business application vendor's role in BSM and its product and channel plans for the coming year.

10 Innovative Products That Offer The Most Opportunities For Solution Providers

As the CRN Test Center got set to pick the 10 most innovative products released in 2003 that could provide the greatest opportunities for solution providers, the prevailing feeling was that despite ongoing economic pressure, 2003 was a year of considerable innovation in nearly every area of the IT industry. For many vendors, those very economic pressures drove the push toward innovation, while for others, true innovation grew out of the needs of end users and solution providers.

Janet Perna, general manager of IBM Software's Data Management group, and Brett MacIntyre, vice president of content management for IBM Software, spoke with CRN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow on Thursday, a day after IBM announced its acquisition of Green Pasture Software, a Corvallis, Ore.-based provider of document management applications. The deal marked the third content management-related acquisition within a year for IBM Software.

VoIP provider i2 Telecom continues its drive into the IT enterprise area by signing VARs, aiming to install Web-telephoning capabilities in small businesses without replacing existing telecommunications infrastructures.

NTT DoCoMo tipped its hand on future offerings Friday, when it announced it will award $344 million to handset developers to work on a generation of handsets based on the Linux and Symbian operating systems.